Massive electricity theft disaster
Eskom is potentially losing billions of rands more per year to illegal prepaid electricity vouchers and bypassed meters than it currently estimates, based on early data from its prepaid meter recoding project.
The power utility’s distribution division and South Africa’s municipalities are racing against time to ensure that all their Standard Transfer Specifications (STS)-compliant meters receive a critical update before 24 November 2024.
On that date, a time-dependent security feature that helps avoid the re-use of tokens is set to run out of range, resulting in all the world’s STS-compliant meters no longer being able to accept new electricity tokens.
To avoid this, prepaid meters must be recoded with two key revision numbers (KRNs) entered into its customer interface unit, the same way regular electricity tokens are loaded.
Eskom announced it pre-coded 6.6 million of its 6.9 million prepaid meters at the end of July 2024.
However, pre-coding is just the first step in updating a prepaid meter to run on KRN version 2.0.
In effect, it merely “activates” a customer so that they would receive their two key change tokens the next time they buy electricity for their meter from a legitimate vendor.
As of 1 August 2024, a few days after Eskom announced the pre-coding, the Eskom KRN rollover dashboard showed that 4,011,148 million meters had been updated.
By 12 August 2025, the number has climbed only slightly to 4,019,465, a measly increase of 8,317. That works out to just 756 meters updated per day this month.
To put that in perspective, the daily update rate stood at about 6,500 between 8 July and 1 August 2024.
That was already down from a previous rate of about 14,670 between the official start date of Eskom’s rollover — 19 October 2023 — and 7 July 2024.
The rate is also substantially lower than what municipalities are achieving.
According to the South African Local Government Association (SALGA) online dashboard, an additional 53,507 meters were updated across municipalities between 1 August and 12 August 2024.
That works out to 4,864 meters updated daily, more than half of Eskom’s tally over the entire 11 days.
Overall, around 26% of municipal customers’ meters have yet to receive the update, compared with around 43% of Eskom Direct customers’ meters.
The screenshots below from Eskom and SALGA’s websites show progress on their respective KRN rollover projects.
Eskom KRN rollover
SALGA KRN rollover (municipalities)
Eskom’s radical rollover slowdown is highly suspicious, given that many people buy their electricity at the beginning of the month due to how Eskom’s incline block tariff (IBT) structure works.
The IBT charges customers more per kWh of energy after exceeding certain monthly consumption thresholds.
Therefore, purchasing small amounts of electricity throughout the month is far better than buying in bulk to last for many months.
The fact that the vast majority of the outstanding 2.6 million pre-coded prepaid meters remain un-updated at the start of the month could suggest one of four things:
- The meters have been bypassed and are consuming electricity without running down their units.
- The meters are being loaded with illegal electricity tokens from illegal or “ghost” vendors with stolen or lost electricity token issuing devices.
- The meters are in areas that Eskom has disconnected.
- The meters are loaded with a large amount of electricity. This is less likely considering how Eskom’s IBT structure works.
Eskom spokesperson Daphne Mokwena told News24 that the power utility would be watching the figures closely in August to see the impact of the pre-coding.
If the rate of updates continues at 756 per day until 24 November 2024, only another 77,868 meters will be updated.
Ignoring the roughly 238,000 meters yet to be pre-coded, that will leave over 2.56 million customers with pre-coded meters unable to buy electricity.
Based on the lack of meter updating in the first part of August 2024, it may very well turn out that a large chunk of these users are buying illegal electricity vouchers — which will not generate the KRNs — or have bypassed their meters.
The potential impact on Eskom’s revenues could be substantial.
If two million of the outstanding customers consumed Eskom’s average of 900kWh per month, they would have stolen R80 billion in electricity on the Homepower 4 tariff for the 2024/2025 financial year.
That goes well beyond Eskom’s previous estimate of annual losses of R5 billion due to electricity theft.
It should be noted that other factors could be contributing to this discrepancy, such as if most of the outstanding meters are inactive.
MyBroadband asked Eskom for feedback on its prepaid meter update slowdown and whether it believed the issue could be attributed to unexpectedly high illegal electricity consumption rates.
The utility said that electricity theft was one of “many reasons” for the slowdown but did not elaborate further.
It emphasised that all customers whose meters had been pre-coded would continue to be able to load tokens after 24 November 2024.
However, illegal electricity vouchers will no longer work.
Eskom also said that it would continue with its energy losses management strategy that focusses on extensive disconnections of zero buyers, issuing remedial charges, and pursuing legal action.
The table below shows some calculations of the estimated value of electricity that could be stolen from Eskom in the current financial year, based on various assumptions of monthly average usage and the number of customers buying illegal electricity and bypassing meters.
| Estimated customers buying illegal electricity and bypassing meters | 450kWh monthly consumption | 600kWh monthly consumption | 900kWh monthly consumption |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 million | R18.13 billion | R23.28 billion | R39.82 billion |
| 1.5 million | R27.20 billion | R34.91 billion | R59.73 billion |
| 2 million | R36.26 billion | R46.56 billion | R79.64 billion |
| 2.5 million | R45.33 billion | R58.20 billion | R99.55 billion |
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